July 2008
A Word From Sara Virtual Family Kingdom is all about families. We have put together a Founder's membership especially for your family which includes special bonuses for you. It is our hope that these special gifts express our appreciation for your helping us make this world a reality. Each of these gifts were created by our staff especially for you. Our graphic artists created the comic book from the story boards that have gone into making Virtual Family Kingdom. The DVD is produced by our media department, and gives you a behind the scene glimpse of what has gone into the making of Virtual Family Kingdom. In addition, our graphics department has created all of the designs for the other gifts. As you know, we always pay attention to detail, and each of these gifts is a one of a kind creation from our family to yours. It also includes three months of the Family V.I.P. Pass membership, which provides many new features especially designed for families and based on the suggestions of our members. We also want you to know that the Family V.I.P. Pass includes those new features which have been requested by our members. When you look at the comparison chart, that shows those features which are free to everyone, you will see that everything you expected to be free is still part of the Basic Membership. In fact, you will discover that there are even new and exciting features included in the basic membership that were never there before. The new features reflect exciting new developments, and are designed around the wonderful suggestions that so many of our community have shared with us. We hope that you find these new features as exciting as we do, and that the Family V.I.P. Pass meets your expectations. One of the most exciting new features is Groups With groups, you can form anything from a small club with your best friends to a complete organization with thousands of members. Share items, build rides, host events, and enjoy being with your friends and family. Large groups even qualify for their own group badge which can be worn by members. Most importantly, your family is a group and can have family rooms where you can create a virtual family home in our world. Even more exciting is our Families Helping Families Program. Each month you can designate, the recognized charity or non-profit organization of your choice and we will donate ten percent of your V.I.P. Pass membership to that organization. You can also create a group for your designated charity or npo and as others join with you, your contributions will add up. By coming together, we can all make a real difference. Sara Virtual Family Kingdom A Note from the Developers July 2nd, 2008 Our graphic artists are putting the final touches on the map for our world, and our schedule is to have it available to everyone a bit later today. One of the most exciting projects we have worked on is the creation of horses for our new world. Next week marks the debut of our first horse, the platinum stallion and with it the stable room and the riding field. Whether it is a leisurely ride, a full gallop, or jumping over obstacles, riding your horse is an experience you will not want to miss. When we began the work on our horses, we started with motion capture files of real life horse movements as the basis for our horses’ gaits. Coordinating this work with our graphic artists has resulted in the development of horses which have natural movements and are fun to ride. Your Development Team Virtual Family Kingdom Fourth of July Independence Day Quest Friday, July Fourth 7:00 A.M. Pacific Time to Saturday, July 5th 10:00 P.M. Pacific Time Blast off this Fourth of July with a celebration of freedom and independence in a quest to discover the mysteries surrounding the founding of the United States. This Friday marks the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Whether you would have been a loyalist, or a revolutionary on the original Fourth of July, you will not want to miss this quest. It's 1776 again and the quest for freedom is on! When you have completed your journey through the past, you will receive 1,000 credits, and your choice of the American or British flag waving on a Stainless Steel flag pole, and our first holiday pin, the 4th of July Let Freedom Ring Pin! A Word from Sara - 2 July 4th, 2008 We want to thank everyone in our community for your overwhelming support of our Founder's Members program and V.I.P. Pass. Our goal is to be an involved good citizen in our community and so we also want to thank ************.com for their support and participation in the Virtual Family Kingdom Founder's Member and V.I.P. Pass program. We would also like to express our gratitude to VFKGadget.com for their excellent companion program to the Virtual Family Kingdom. Again, our thanks to all our community and especially our most excellent beta testers for making all of this become a reality. When we all come together, there is nothing we cannot accomplish! Sara Virtual Family Kingdom A Note from the Developers - 2 July 4th, 2008 With the introduction of our map inspired by our community we have all of the major elements in our new virtual world. Now that we have the structure and major elements in place we are transitioning to Release Candidate One. Later today, about 5:00 PM Pacific time, just before dusk on the east coast (an excellent time to start a fireworks display), we will open our fireworks game. As you all know, our last minute testing can always reveal some bug which will result in something being delayed, but we are planning on 5:00 PM Pacific time. As you already know, we always strive for something that is new and innovative, and usually a bit beyond our reach! Over the next two days we will also be adding a lot of new elements which complete our base elements, not the least of these will be the ability to finally sit down and blink. We will also add IM this weekend, which is the basis for our groups and clubs! In addition, we will also bid goodbye to the ubiquitous "pink couch" label and the bug in the Audubon Wildlife Adventure game which makes the last question always wrong. On a more prosaic note, we have also completed the re-factoring of our basic engine again which will make all rooms load significantly quicker. This update is planned for Friday night. This should be another exciting weekend in our virtual world! Your Development Team Virtual Family Kingdom July 4th, 2008 We have just completed testing of our new maps, and everything is working great! As we have completed our testing, we have updated the registration database to include all of those who are on our waiting list. To complete your registration and create your character, click on the Register button. So for all of those who have been so kind and patient on our waiting list, we want to welcome you to Virtual Family Kingdom! Remember when you are creating your login that your user name can be different from your character name, or they can be the same. For our existing Beta testers, if you have friends or family who are on the waiting list, please let them know that they can now register. We will also be sending out an email to let those on the waiting list know that they can register now. We look forward to seeing you in the kingdom, have a great 4th of July! Your Development Team Virtual Family Kingdom P.S. For all of our existing Beta testers, we want you to know that we are running behind on including the new fireworks game, but we felt is was important to complete our testing so that all those on the waiting list could be included today. With any luck, we should still have the game up this evening! A Note From The Developers - 3 July 4th, 2008 We are still experiencing some issues when switching between levels in the fireworks game. We don’t want everyone to wait around, so we are going to postpone releasing the game until tomorrow when we feel sure we will have the switching correct. Have a happy 4th of July! Your Development Team Virtual Family Kingdom P.S. We will have an interesting surprise tomorrow evening, to go with our rain date. A Note From The Developers - 4 July 6th, 2008 We want to thank all of those who helped us with our live test of the new fireworks game last night, everything is looking great and we should make it live a bit later this morning! Your Development Team Virtual Family Kingdom Freedom Through Time Quest '7:00 A.M. Pacific Time, Sunday, July 20th to 10:00 P.M. Pacific Time Monday July 21st, 2008 ' Enjoy a time traveling adventure where we discover the struggle for freedom throughout history, including our new Australian setting. Of course, what would traveling throughout time and space be without the right equipment? Your reward this week for completing the quest is our first set of Teleporters! These teleporters make it possible for you to teleport between any member rooms. This can be two of your own rooms, or you can give one of the teleporters to a friend, and then you can teleport to each others rooms any time, even when your friend is not online! These are great for building mazes, and labyrinths! The set today is the Marlin's Magma-porter. In addition, you will receive a reward of 1,000 credits! A Note From The Developers - 5 Well, one of our horses made an unexpected debut this morning. We were testing part of the AI for the horse, and VFK_MIntie’s horse got to a jump point in the paddock which led to the map. After that, the horse did what it was supposed to do, which was avoid people by either going to another jump point, or in the worst case if cornered it would teleport back to its home paddock. Once back in its paddock, it would head to the jump point again, and we would be off chasing the horse once more. Short of shutting down the server we were not sure how to corral it. Finally, several developers blocked the jump point in the paddock, and the horse decided to stay! We did have a lot of help from everyone up late trying to corral our wayward horse. It was an exciting test, and we learned something about interacting with our new horse. Your Development Team Virtual Family Kingdom